Thanks
by Cold Flat Coke
Summary: Thanksgiving with Pam. Nothing too consequential happens. Of course.


This was the first Thanksgiving she didn't have to juggle time between her family and Roy's. Normally, they started local at Roy's house, and after an early dinner she would drive out to her aunt's house in Hamilton, New Jersey. With Thanksgiving traffic it was a three hour drive, two and a half if Roy was driving. He didn't usually, though; the past couple of years, she had actually driven by herself and Roy had stayed at home. She hadn't minded, exactly. The drive gave her time to think and play a couple CDs the whole way through.

This year, however, was a little different. Driving without escaping anything made the solitude less of a treat. This year, the solitude was the thing to escape. That was, after all, why she left for New Jersey at 5:00 Wednesday evening, instead of indulging in her usual after work routine of stir fry and Jeopardy and then leaving the next morning.

She frowned at the traffic. Scowled. Made faces. But the truth was the darkness was making her feel a little gloomy, a word she usually reserved for poorly lit rooms and Eeyore. Worse, the headlights made her feel sentimental. They always did. The feeling charged every slow song the radio with special meaning, deserved or not. A Janice Ian song came on and she almost had to pull over on the side of the road for the tears.

She remembered watching him watch a football game with his uncles and father one year. She wasn't exactly watching herself, but glanced over while she crumbled pecans for the sweet potato casserole in the kitchen. There was a halftime giveaway for a pickup truck—a Durango or a Pathmaker or whatever—and a blond woman in a football jersey wound up winning. "Wow, is she available?" he had said, laughing. She knew he wouldn't have made that comment if he knew she was listening, but she was. Initially she was stung, of course, and turned sharply on her stool back towards the kitchen, where she half-listened to the women gossip about the neighbors. Really, though, she didn't even know if she were upset or just feeling like she should be upset. She had tried to think of a situation where she would say the same thing. Maybe... if they were watching the winter Olympics... and there was a mid-curling giveaway for a trip to Europe... and a really cute, supportive-seeming guy won. She almost laughed out loud. She would _totally_ say it then! She couldn't wait for the next winter Olympics.

Now, driving by herself, she wasn't exactly thrilled that she was alone, but it was probably for the best if she had to pretend to be indignant about things like that. She was really going to miss that sweet potato casserole, though...

She made it to her aunt's house around 8:30, hungry. She was thankful for the cold meatloaf waiting there for her, and made a mental note to bring it up at tomorrow's grace.

Her aunt and uncle, as well as her older sister and her parents who had all arrived earlier, seemed determined not to let her forget she was alone by bringing up Roy and the break up and how sad it must be to be single on Thanksgiving when both her sisters were married. Eyes dull, salting her meatloaf, she wondered why they were even bringing it up. The breakup was months ago. Was she going to have to do this at every major holiday? Still, for all their unsolicited sympathy, there was not a trace of deception when they told her she was better off without him.

Thanksgiving was nice. She always missed her own family's Thanksgiving dinner by being with Roy's family, and it was really quite nice, even if her mom did use store-bought stuffing.

She napped on the couch for two hours after dinner, and it felt pleasantly indulgent. Triptophane. Lovely.

She woke up to find everyone paired: her mother and father, her aunt and uncle, her sisters and their husbands, her cousin and his fiancé. She fidgeted. It wasn't like her first time being here for Thanksgiving by herself, but it was her first time being here _alone_. Still in a haze of sleep, she wrapped herself up in a blanket and walked out to the porch undetected.

She remembered being on this porch last Thanksgiving, waiting for a friend of hers to show up. One of the neighborhood kids she knew from visits during her childhood was in town with her family and promised to come over after dinner. It seemed her friend ate later than she did, because she felt like she was waiting for quite some time. She brought a glass of wine out to warm her up and ease her nerves about seeing her old friend. It wound up making her feel a little silly, and a little sad that no one was there to see her feel a little silly. She thought about calling Jim, just to pass the time before her friend came, and brought up his number on her cell phone without really thinking about it. Would that be wrong? Why? She pressed send anyway. It was one of those moments when you're almost no conscious of what you're doing, just that you're doing it. Like maybe the feeling you get when you force yourself to jump into a lake from a high branch, or the feeling a runner gets when the starter pistol sounds. Your mind is kind of blank, white, and you're just moving. She couldn't believe she got that feeling from pressing a button.

While it was ringing, she was fairly certain he wouldn't pick up, and so was fairly flustered when he did. "Hey! You picked up!"

"Pam? Hey! What's up?" It sounded like he was in a room with a lot of other guys, all talking and laughing.

"Oh ah, it's nothing, just—"

"Can you hold on for just a second, let me get out of here..." She heard the chatter in the background fade and a door close. "So uh, hey, happy Thanksgiving!"

"Happy Thanksgiving." She ducked her head and smiled bashfully. Even being a little tipsy she felt shy, and hearing the people in the background made her feel like she was interrupting something. "Uh, if you're busy now, I could call back later?" Even though she probably wouldn't.

"Uh, no, I'm just hanging out with some guys from home, nothing big. So what about you, what's up?"

"Oh, I'm at my aunt's house, I'm just waiting for my friend to show up and I thought, I don't know—"

"Oh I get it! You're calling me to kill time before your friend shows up. Nice."

She grinned into the phone, because he found out her plot immediately and he didn't care. "No-o-o! Of _course_ not... I just had to find out how the green bean casserole was at your house."

"Do you have green bean casserole every year too? The cream of mushroom soup kind?"

"Uh, yeah, duh! It's a Thanksgiving staple."

"I wonder if every family has to eat that. Like all the moms in America decided on that recipe."

"Mmm, I dunno. What about the dads of America? What do they do?"

"Maybe... yams?"

"Yams or sweet potatoes?"

"Same difference."

"Oh ho ho! How wrong you are, my friend. There's a world of difference. Heaps of difference, between those two!" She was getting articulate with her tipsiness, she thought. She never would have thought of the word 'heaps' otherwise. She smiled again, widely, victoriously.

"I bet you can't even name two things that are different."

"Strength and vigor."

He laughed. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know! They're different, right?"

"Well, yeah..." He laughed again, bemusedly. He probably didn't really have anything to say to that. She didn't either, so she giggled and twisted in her chair. She wasn't sober enough to feel self-conscious about the silence that followed. Ordinarily, it could have been a pause pregnant with meaning, but for her, now, it was just so comfortable... she closed her eyes and sighed audibly.

They didn't really have trouble finding things to talk about: Jim griped about how he got stuck polishing the silver every year ("I said I liked it _once_ and suddenly no one else will do it and it's my job forever.") and Pam went on for five minutes about the merits of canned cranberry sauce ("You can see the ridges from the can on the sides! It's so cool!"). Other topics came and went. She also made sure to pepper the conversation with exasperation about her friend's lateness, for good measure.

Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes into the conversation she said, "I'm sorry, I've been keeping you from your friends all this time, and I'm really just calling you because I'm bored waiting for my friend. If you want to go hang out with your friends, that's fine."

He chuckled. "Trying to shrug me off? No way. If you want out of this conversation, you're going to have to do it yourself."

Was it perceptive of him? Their conversations, their _private_ conversations, usually got to a point where she felt she needed to escape, like they were on the edge of something... wrong. Not exactly wrong, but forbidden. Unknown. She should know better. And it panicked her when they got that close, and it was so much easier to run from it. But just this once, because she wasn't thinking, and didn't even realize that's what it was really, she cocked her head to the side and smiled and said in a way that was almost a sigh, "That's not what I meant."

He laughed quietly, lowly, darkly. She twisted.

And their conversation continued. Her friend arrived maybe ten minutes later and that was it. It wasn't until later, until now maybe, on the same porch, that she appreciated the challenge he offered then and what it meant. He wanted her on the line as long as he could get her. He wanted her...

A year later, she contemplated calling him again. She flipped open her phone. She flipped it closed again. She decided she needed a drink. She snuck inside and took a Yuengling back out with her. Her hands were too pink and soft to twist off the top, and she almost destroyed her sweater by using it as an intermediary to get the cap off.

She took a sip. It tasted like Roy. She put the phone away.

And later, she realized she had forgotten to mention the meatloaf at grace.


End file.
